Love and Industry (ePub)

"The 20 essays . . . pack a punch-not the sort that gives you an immediate bruise, but one that leaves you strangely sore for days . . ." -Kerry Cardoza, Chicago Reader

New Lenox, Illinois, is a small town deep in the corn grid of the Midwest, where it runs up against the grid of south Chicagoland, a placeless location marked by geographical flatness and dwindling industry. It's also where Sonya Huber grew up, and in the twenty essays collected here, she lovingly explores the ways New Lenox-and the Midwest more generally-has come to define her life. Here, you'll find portraits of Huber's parents as they tirelessly run a small business, homages to the Gen-X joys of wearing flannel, secret insights about being a Pizza Hut waitress, and odes to the ecstasy of blasting classic rock as your car hurls along I-80. Whether she's writing about All in the Family, detailing the region's influence on David Foster Wallace, or exploring the poetry embedded in a can of Miller High Life, her vision is astute and her prose convincing.

Sometimes experimental and always inventive, Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook takes seriously Chicagoland's farthest reaches-gritty, sweeping, a region full of its own distinct feelings of "almostness"-and transforms them into a map of the heart, a ramshackle territory marked by memory, family, regret, determination, and wonderment.

"A must read" -Library Journal

"Huber is a masterful essayist" -Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life